Sun stuns with on-time arrival of Niagara III

Out of Africa and the labs

Just weeks after posting a profit, Sun Microsystems has dealt out another shocker – a future version of its UltraSPARC T1 chip should arrive on time.

Sun's server chieftain John Fowler today revealed that "Victoria Falls" – the third version of the UltraSPARC T1 – taped out in October. That puts the chip right in line with Sun's previous plans unearthed by El Reglast March and has the part due to fit in servers during the first half of 2008. The "Victoria Falls" chip will continue Sun's push to cram UltraSPARC T1s into multi-processor servers.

In the second half of this year, Sun plans to ship "Niagara II"-based servers that will handle double the threads of today's UltraSPARC T1 chip and have more floating point support. The Victoria Falls chips will then handle 128 threads per box.